


in the dying lamplight

by shadesoflondon



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: (i cut literally 3 pages when editing.... yeah perfectionism), F/M, Gratuitous italics, Hate Sex, Horny Alina, Horny Darkling, I'm not joking - Freeform, Loss of Virginity, MUAHAHAHAHA, Smut, angry alina, but hey we can't win every battle, mixed bag of sexual acts, they're both a little off, this was the horniest he ever was in canon, we're ignoring the fete because there's a chance that was mostly manipulation, why did this take me... months, will likely edit later because #perfectionism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:27:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23166229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadesoflondon/pseuds/shadesoflondon
Summary: I looked into Mal’s eyes—his familiar blue eyes that I knew even better than my own. Except they weren’t blue. In the dying lamplight, they glimmered quartz gray.He smiled then, a cold, clever smile like none I’d ever seen on his lips.“I missed you too, Alina.”Instead of responding with fear, Alina responds with anger. A different take on the scene where he comes to her.
Relationships: The Darkling | Aleksander Morozova/Alina Starkov
Comments: 29
Kudos: 219





	in the dying lamplight

**Author's Note:**

> In the words of Oscar Wilde, “everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
> 
> Yay, smut!! *happy dance*

_I looked into Mal’s eyes—his familiar blue eyes that I knew even better than my own. Except they weren’t blue. In the dying lamplight, they glimmered quartz gray._

_He smiled then, a cold, clever smile like none I’d ever seen on his lips._

_“I missed you too, Alina.” That voice. Cool and smooth as glass._

_Mal’s features melted into shadow and then formed again like a face from the mist. Pale, beautiful, that thick shock of black hair, the perfect sweep of jaw._

_The Darkling rested one gentle hand on my cheek. “Soon,” he whispered._

**** **______**

It took everything in me and more not to scream. But louder than my fear was anger, and like the crack of a whip my hand shot out to grab his wrist. 

“What do you mean?” I rasped.

He had faded from view, a blurred vision in the dark, but I was not ready for him to go. My fingers tightened their grip as if to anchor him down. 

“What do you _mean?”_

Around us sounded a crackle of thunder. If I listened, I could hear the soft beating of rain against the shuttered windows, but I didn’t care to. My world was narrowed to a single, fixed point: him. At his lack of response my fingernails bit into the skin of his wrist, and I thought he would laugh. Instead he leaned in closer. The cold curve of his smile deepened.

“How ferocious you are.” His soft breath hit my neck. “You want to hate me. You relish that need. Yet no matter how hard you try, you cannot make yourself do it.” His eyebrows shifted down minutely, appraising. “Are you so cantankerous with your _otkazat’sya_ lovers?”

The pulse in my neck thudded. I struggled for words, struggled for calm. “Never mind. Stop this. Stop talking.”

He looked to the fingers of his free hand, trailing them gently over my cheek as he said, “Why keep me here, if you don’t wish to hear me speak?”

It was anger then, that flashed through my blood with the lightning.

“Because I want to know if this is real. Speak of that.”

He leaned forward again, lips nearly grazing my own. Both of his hands touched my face. “It is as real as you wish it.”

I studied his amused eyes, his lips, his rising chest. All so real. So corporeal. 

“Give me a straight answer.”

“Afraid you’re going mad, sankta?”

I loosed an animal’s growl. “No more of these mind games. You appear, and you intimidate me. I’m done being toyed with like this.”

That cold chuckle was back. It sent my nerves aflame, made me crave violence and other unspeakable things. “But you make it so easy.”

I shoved his arms away, pulling myself up into a seated position. 

“You want me to love you, but you do nothing but manipulate me. I don’t even know you, yet you chase me like I am your runaway broodmare. You appear now because you want to play your stupid mind games,” I said. “I am _tired_ , old man, and I am done doing this.”

His lashes cast shadows over his face, his voice a delicate scrape against the room’s stretching silence. “You think so little of me.”

“If not that, then what did you come here for?” My fingers clutched at the blankets. Confusion, frustration, helplessness – it was a familiar choir singing through me – but my anger rose with a new force, waterfalling in faster than I could summon sunlight. A thought bloomed. My blood went hot with rage, with shame. With want. Blinking, he looked to the ugly curl of my lips, and down to my hands where they fisted the fabric of my clothes.

“Surely you’re not here for _this,_ ” I spat, and grabbed at the soft edges of my nightgown. It went off over my head and fell to the floor. My hair tumbled down, unruly and brown against the flush of my breasts, and I cursed my inexperience for the blush staining my cheeks. 

The Darkling’s pale eyes shifted to my skin. His emotion came on with a boom of thunder; quickly, violently. “And if I did want _this?”_ There was that rage again, an ever present crackling. His jaw clenched, his fingers flexed, and his eyes shuttered. All symptoms of anger. Yet as he glared up at me from under those dark lashes, I knew from the stirrings in my gut that it was not that. Something different, but adjacent...

My confidence waxed and waned. I shook my head. He didn’t want me. He couldn’t want me. Why would he, if even Mal didn’t?

He reached for me quickly, fingers gentle at first, and when I stayed limp I felt the hunger he’d suppressed rush to the surface. I thought of Mal, who found a new girl each time he was stressed or upset. Who buried his feelings in other people, who showed me no loyalty.

Mal had been with others. No, the Darkling did not have his blue eyes. But he had hands and a mouth and a⎯

I sucked in a silent breath of air. The Darkling’s hands had skimmed over my waist. When he brought his mouth near mine, I let him, aware of every shift of his eyes over my face. With quickening breaths I closed the distance between us.

“Are you real?” The question was a whisper against his lips. He looked down at me with a devouring gaze, the blackness in it cavernous. 

“Yes.” 

I wanted shock to hit me like a splash of cold water. I wanted my disgust, a feeling I was all too familiar with around the Darkling, but I got neither thing. Instead I felt a thrill of adrenaline, anger at being spied on, confusion that he caused me so much inner turmoil. The emotions were a tangle that I couldn’t unknot. One thread called out to me then, as his eyes fixed to my lips: the aching twang of lust.

Well, Mal had been with Zoya. Surely it would be no sin if I indulged one time, if I let fate play its hand. Giving myself no more time to doubt, I reached to my lower undergarments and tugged them off. They weren’t much, just a scrap of cloth between myself and the sheets bunched messily around us, but it was the last of my clothing. 

The Darkling dragged his eyes over me. 

I made sure to hide nothing, to keep the defiant raise of my chin, the proud brace of my arms on the mattress. I wondered what I must look like to him. Small and mousy and inadequate; his polar opposite, his perfect antithesis. 

What would happen if he consumed me? If we consumed each other? 

With a trembling resoluteness, I laced one of his hands with mine and brought it to my chest. It felt like a normal man’s. No heady amplification. He pulled his fingers free to trace over my skin, and I shuddered, eyes falling to half-mast as a knuckle brushed over my nipple. The dam that held this unsteady resolve was cracking. I felt my control over him filter through the fissures like water between my fingers, trickling and trickling away. At least for a moment I had held the power. In the wake of my inexperience, it was his again.

He glanced back up to my face, once. And then his deft fingers latched themselves to my hip bones and yanked me into his lap. Fabric scraped over my bare thighs, chafing against the warm, viscous heat of my cunt, and a bucket full of adrenaline emptied itself into my bloodstream. Unable to help myself, I gasped into his ear. Pulled back to look at him. Those high, cold cheekbones were flushed a heady pink, and his usually tame hair was left disordered from our earlier kissing. We were nearly lined up, center to center, but our mouths were not, so I jerked him by the hair of his neck until our lips were even. 

An idea bloomed as I scanned over his face. It was crazy, but so was everything. I wanted him. I wanted this. I leaned forward to test the idea, searching myself for a hint of revulsion or fear, but both feelings eluded me. 

“Alina,” he gritted out. Instead of answering, I put a finger to his lips. They parted in surprise - and he was practically glowering at me - yet I couldn’t think past the fact that _I wanted him._ Alarm bells rang in the far corners of my consciousness, but they were so _quiet_ , and I could feel the firmness of him right at my cunt, which was slick and getting slicker⎯ 

“Can I try something?” I asked. The Darkling said nothing in response, but I could see in the dark, eager pit of his eyes that he wanted me to go on. His lips were still parted, and I realized that he was breathing through them, chest rising and falling at nearly the speed of my own. 

Tentatively, I leaned in close enough to kiss, watching as his eyes narrowed into the tiniest of slits. Yet I didn’t brush our mouths together. I didn’t have much experience in the way of kissing, but I had heard of this done before - so I curved my body a little closer to his, reached out with my teeth, and _tugged_ his lower lip free. 

His eyes slid open to watch me do it. 

I lost myself for a moment in the sheer darkness of them, in the rushing of my veins, and if sex was always like this, why did people ever stop? Not that we had slept together yet. 

_Yet._

What was I doing?

Before I was able to pull myself from him, he leaned in to close the final distance between our mouths. There was a shock of warmth. A dampness that made the pulse in my wrists fizz like the best champagne, slick and smooth. I could barely breathe from the wrongness of what was happening, from the jack-hammering of my treasonous heart, yet when he ran his tongue over the seam of my lips, my resistance only weakened. He turned his head slightly to catch my lower lip between his own, and then he tugged too, causing a surprised whoosh of air to leave my nose. 

A terrifying ache unfurled deep in my center, spreading from the heels of my feet straight to the fingers still knotted in his hair. It occurred to me to pull. To yank as hard as I could. To make him cry out. Every fiber of my being sang at the idea of inflicting violence upon him, but as our lips slid slowly apart and back together, I just couldn’t make myself.

He pulled away to look at me.

I glanced between the bruised red of his lips, red like blood, red like a crushed rose, and the quick fluttering of his heavy lashes. Was he thinking, still, of bedding me? Or was there more to this visit than that, more to the way his eyes unhurriedly roamed over the planes of my face?

Blankly he ordered, “Lay back on the bed.” 

I stared, watching as he wet his lips with his tongue. I was not the naive little girl he met months ago; I would not lie back like a tamed mare and spread my legs. I set my chin and did not look away. “Make me.” 

It came out loud. Too loud. Too harsh for the bedroom, which until now held a silence broken only by rainfall and our heavy breathing. A sneer twisted the corners of his mouth, but despite that I swore I saw a trace of eagerness flash in his eyes, there and gone. He pressed his thumb into my mouth then dragged a line of moisture down my chin.

“So be it.”

The lithe muscles of his forearms flexed as he shoved me back onto the sheets. I held the notion that he would kiss me again, but the first place his hungry mouth sought was the bare expanse of my neck. He bit the pulse there, tasting it, body folding over mine so entirely that I could smell the wicked darkness under his skin. Something was building there. A thrumming hunger.

I undid the buttons of his shirt as quickly as my trembling hands allowed, and his hot, open mouth trailed from my collar to my nipple.

_Oh._

Without time for me to even cry out, he slid back, lifted my thigh, and pressed that mouth to the inside. The sheets in my fists bunched as he lapped at the skin there, then traded tongue for vicious teeth. Stars burst behind the closed lids of my eyes. I could feel dents forming on my legs, purple ones that would bruise later, but I couldn’t find it in myself to care. The weight of his stare bore down on me. In a flash of self consciousness I refused to watch him back; squeezed the tight press of my eyes even tighter. Climbing off the mattress, he dragged my body to the edge, then fell on his knees. 

“How fitting that we are on _my_ bed.” 

Now, I looked.

“Stop being so smug.”

Hooking his arms around my thighs, he drew me closer and rested his hooded eyes between my legs. “A saint and a virgin. I have much work to do.”

With no change in expression, no aversion of gaze, he pressed his open mouth to _that place_. I couldn’t help it; I jolted. One of the elbows supporting my body nearly gave out, and his responding chuckle sent vibrations straight to my most sensitive part. A moan left me, surprised, loud, catching in my throat and sending my neck bowing back. 

He moved so that he could kiss along the curve of my hip. Little pecks made their way up to my navel, and then he climbed onto me in order to lick a steady line up to my breasts. The last thing my body wanted was to push him away. But I didn’t want to look at him, either. I didn’t want to look as he slipped off his shirt and threw it to the floor, and I most certainly didn’t want to look as the sharp scrape of buckles being undone filled the quiet. 

“Alina,” he said. “Look at me.”

I have always been transparent with him. 

A cool hand brushed my cheek, and I opened my eyes to stare up at his even cooler gaze. 

“I am going to help you with your little affliction.”

My breath was quavering more than a flame in a heavy wind, but I managed to raise a brow. “Affliction?” 

He hummed, looking me over. “Virginity.”

I almost laughed, but it turned into an angry hiccup, and the sensation of his hand moving to cup the throbbing warmth between my thighs blotted out everything else. A keening whimper echoed against the walls of my throat. My need for something, anything, _friction_ , grew and exploded, and it took every snip of my self control not to roll my hips upward into the firm press of his palm. I was dizzy with the urge, gripping tightly at the blankets at my sides. The Darkling leaned forward again to capture my mouth, and I was lost.

I noted dimly the path his lips took from my mouth across the bottom of my jaw; tender, angry. Then he was at my ear, and he was whispering for me to relax. 

“What are you⎯?”

His left hand used the stag amplifier to lift my head off the bed, and his right held my waist still. He was between my legs - he had been, this whole time - but now the pads of his fingers squeezed into my pelvis, and as if I were nothing more than a rag doll, he jerked my hips up so that they aligned with his. I was breathing hard and he was breathing hard and my neck was cricked from the weird angle, but it was all forgotten as he began to run the moist head of his arousal against my cunt.

It slipped back and forth, wetly, teasingly, and I was sure I had never felt more aware of my own emptiness. Ragged gasps escaped through my clenched teeth. He gave no warning when he slid himself in, only descended upon my leveraged mouth to swallow my cry of alarm. 

Oh. 

_Oh._

The Darkling did not stop kissing me and I did not stop whimpering. He was thick and stretching and painful, sensations which hit with enough force to make my eyes prick. Lightheaded, I felt the dry brush of his flat pelvis rock against my hips. He rolled out and in, once, and I broke away from him with a gasp.

He continued to hold my head up, gripping the antlers like one would grip the reins of a horse, and despite myself, I could not keep from glancing up again and again at the flush riding his cheekbones. 

“Tilt your hips up,” he murmured. I did as he asked, watching his face all the while. Then skin, _his_ skin, was rubbing against the tight little bead of flesh above my cunt, and pleasure began to prickle through me. My eyelids fluttered.

The rolling of his hips became thrusts. He finally released my neck, allowing me to fall back onto the mattress. Tight warmth began to spread from where our skin met and reverberated through my body, making it impossible to feel anything else, think of anything else. It wasn’t unlike the times I pleased myself alone. Only now the Darkling was shifting over me, our bodies intertwined, and there was so much heat building between us, so much _more,_ and for the first time in my life I felt in perfect balance. I felt torn _open_. 

Everything forced down into my deep, dark crevices was burbling to the surface. To ward off the pleasure, to steel away my own vulnerability, I attempted to raise myself up on my elbows and block it all out. It didn’t work. 

A wounded sound escaped my lips. “No, no, no, no, no.” 

_“Yes,”_ he growled, slamming me back down by the throat. I stared up at him wide-eyed, hands flying to grab at his wrist and pry it away. The pinioning muscles flexed. He didn’t let go. “Don’t fight it, Alina.”

“I will always fight it.”

His beautiful, colored face laughed. Black hair fell over his forehead. “Can I admit something to you?” he asked, still moving, still thrusting. I bit my lip. He took that as a yes. Smugly, deliberately, he lowered his mouth to my ear, and his hips slowed so that he curled into me farther. Deeper. “I like this rebellious spirit of yours.” 

Hot breath hit my neck. 

“I like this game of ours, Alina.” He rutted into me once, so hard that it pushed a moan free from my lungs. 

I shook my head and felt him chuckle. “I hate you,” I said. 

“Of course.”

“I mean it.”

He pulled back to look at me and resumed his pace. “I know you do.” 

I did my best to remain still and quiet, but as he kept brushing against the apex of my thighs, that became very difficult very fast. The hand still wrapped around my neck squeezed a fraction tighter. Breathing became harder. 

He leaned in close enough that I could see the small ring of grey iris around his pupils. “You can beg for me to let you go,” he said.

 _“No.”_ With my dwindling air and self-control, it came out as a long whine. Why was it that he always had the upper hand? He played on my assumptions, my wants and desires. Pinned underneath him, I was more than capable of returning the favor.

Sure, he was the master of weaponized sexuality. But I was an apt pupil. Arching my throat into his hand, I crushed my thighs against him as tightly as I was able, ankles brushing against the small of his back. I pried his free hand from where it was braced beside my head and moved it to my breast.

“Touch me.”

He shuddered, eyes narrowing. He knew exactly what I was doing. But that didn’t make him immune. 

When he palmed my breast, I tilted up into the caress and licked my lips. A heavy exhale rattled from somewhere deep in his throat. I glided my hands over his shoulders and down his chest for as far as I could reach, then rested them over his collar bones, no longer suppressing the low sounds fluttering out from behind my ribs. The movement of his hips stuttered for a moment. Then they resumed faster, more aggressive, and I watched the loathful tensing of his face through half closed eyes. His defined jaw feathered.

Satisfied, I let my eyes slip closed completely. That rushing, thrumming desire covered me like a second skin, and I knew then just how good it would feel to truly let him consume me. I also knew how dangerous this was. Needing it to be over, I clawed one hand into his back, and another into his neck. _“More,”_ I whispered. 

“Anything,” he replied gutturally. And he gave me more.

I came apart seconds before him, my body seizing up and my head lifting to bury itself in the crook of his neck. It was death without dying, empty and unending darkness, just the presence of him like a single flaming star. I held onto him, the only thing that existed, the only thing that mattered, until I fell back into myself, shaking. Then there was the feeling of sweat cooling on skin, and the awkward weight of the Darkling still bearing over me. I scraped my fingernails gently down his sides as he rode out his own high. 

He trembled for a long few moments, silent and stoic, with his face buried in my hair. We stayed that way for a long few more, waiting for the rest of the world to come trickling back in.

Rain on shutters. Sputtering lamplight. The Darkling lifted his head from where it rested against mine, then slid our hips apart. His mouth fell to my neck and brushed over the bruises there, not quite kissing or licking, but claiming. Reassuring. I flinched.

If he noticed, he said nothing, but it wasn't like he needed to. Satisfaction radiated from the crooked kilter of his mouth, the blush staining the height of his cheekbones. Softly he said, “Oh, how I cannot wait to tell your tracker of this.”

A sharp inhale whistled through my nose. “Don’t.”

“So you wish to let him live a lie?” I could hear all the layers of that satisfaction, smugness, laid bare. “By all means.”

The emotional fallout of what I’d just done came crashing down, and suddenly I felt overwhelmed, trapped in a cage of my own making. I pushed away from him. “Leave.”

“Running from our problems again, are we?”

“Get out.”

His hand shot out to pin my wrist to the bed, and I glared up at him.

“Come to me.” Dark, dilated pupils fixed on my face. With his bare chest slicked with sweat, I thought of us only moments before, tangled up together and burning…

I shook my head to clear the shame.

“Very well. I will find a way to get to you, Alina. There will be nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.” He leaned forward to brush one last tender kiss to my collar, and lifted his mouth to my ear. “I could stay tonight, if you wanted,” he murmured. 

“I will cut you _down.”_

He smiled against my cheek. Then, like he was never there to begin with, he was gone.

My hand flew to my face, where his lips skimmed only a moment before. I looked around, taking in the mess of sheets, and the chamber door that had been, thankfully, shut. What had I done?

 **** **______**

  
It was only hours later, when the storm broke and dawn spilled through the cracks in the shutters that I realized he had never answered my original question. _Soon_ , he had said. I was a damned fool. Abandoning any hope of sleep, I threw on the nightgown from the floor and rushed for the door.

Nikolai would need to know.

**Author's Note:**

> (the apt pupil line doesn't come in until ruin and rising, but whatever. creative liberties and all that)
> 
> If anyone has an idea for another alarkling smut piece, let me know in the comments! I always try to have a mini project to work on in case I have writers block on my main one.
> 
> I like to think of his visitations as a form of psychological torture, of sorts. Better yet - psychological warfare. What a bastard! Love him.


End file.
